A Thousand Small Explosions

by John Marrs

  Despite their many differences and the divides that separated their worlds, Ellie had never felt as equal in a romantic partnership as she did with Tim. He was rough around the edges and certainly wasn’t her usual type physically. But once she’d allowed herself to open up and let their genetic link lead the way, none of their contrasts mattered. She had been drawn to him like a magnetic field and it felt wonderful.

  They spent many of their after-work hours living a comfortable, pedestrian life at Tim’s Leighton Buzzard home. Then twice a week she’d send a car to pick him up so they could stay at Ellie’s London house. However, she often felt self-conscious spending time in the home she’d created for herself. The £5,000 spent on a single roll of wallpaper, the Swarovski crystal kitchen cupboard door handles, the basement cinema she rarely used… all reminders of a time when she assumed that creating a beautiful home was all that was required for a meaningful post-work existence.

  Along with curtailing her working hours – she’d imposed a new rule not to remain in her office after six o’clock - Ellie had also turned her back on the trendy London eateries she frequented in favour of small, provincial pubs, the theatre, watching Sunday league football games and nights spent curled up on the sofa watching television box sets. Only the presence of Andrei and his colleagues keeping guard in their cars outside Tim’s home reminded her that their relationship was different to other people’s.

  ‘We’re almost here,’ Ellie announced as the car pulled into the street where she’d grown up. Little had changed in the Derbyshire suburb of Sandiacre where she’d spent the first eighteen years of her life; the 1950s-built detached houses remained virtually untouched by progress, with the exception of replacement PVC windows and block paving over lawns to make room for more vehicles. It had been a safe, nurturing environment for her and she was ashamed for having turned her back on everything that made her.

  ‘Oh my God, make way for the Queen’s arrival!’ yelled her sister Maggie from the doorstep as she flung her arms open wide and squeezed her younger sister. ‘And she’s brought someone with her!’

  A cheer rang out from the lounge of Ellie’s mother’s house as her family and neighbours descended upon their guests. Take That’s Greatest Hits blared from a hi-fi system’s speakers underneath a sign that read ‘Happy 70th birthday Mum.’ A dining room table pushed against the wall was covered in napkins, party foods, plastic cups, plastic cutlery and paper plates.

  ‘Ooh, let me get a look at you,’ Maggie continued and grabbed Tim, spinning him around like a Lazy Susan so everyone could size him up. ‘You’ve done well there,’ she said to Ellie and clutched her sister’s arm.

  A woman walked through the doorway who, judging by her striking resemblance to Ellie and Maggie, could only be their mother. ‘Come here girl,’ Sue grinned and eyed her daughter up and down. ‘You need a bloody good meal inside you; you’re looking right skinny. And who’s this handsome lad?’

  ‘This is my boyfriend Tim,’ Ellie replied.

  ‘Nice to meet you Mrs Stanford,’ he began and went to shake her hand.

  ‘Call me Sue,’ she replied. ‘Now let’s get you a drink and you can tell me all about yourself. At least you look normal, you should have seen the last one she brought home – he spent the whole day eyeing up the estate working out how much he could buy it for to demolish and develop. Cheeky bugger.’

  For the next hour, Tim was paraded around the house from room to room, having drinks thrust into his hand by strangers and being introduced to family members he likely wouldn’t remember the names of the next day. He danced with Ellie’s two youngest nieces, chatted football with her brothers-in-law and was given a guided tour of a newly erected shed by her father. Ellie watched proudly from the sidelines the man who’d reminded her she could have the best of both worlds.

  ‘I’m sorry, has Mum been giving you the third degree?’ Ellie asked when Sue led him back into the kitchen.

  ‘Not at all,’ smiled Tim. ‘I’ve been getting all the gossip about what you were like as a kid – and you were a right little geek by all accounts. And no boobs until you were seventeen?’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘Don’t try and deny it Ells,’ her mother interrupted, ‘Flat as an ironing board until she could learn how to drive. And she always had her nose in a book but when she discovered science, that was it. She once set fire to her curtains in her bedroom with magnesium and a test tube she had stolen from school.’

  Ellie shook her head and felt herself blush, much to Tim’s amusement. ‘I’m just going to borrow your bathroom then you can tell me more about her exes,’ Tim interrupted, and gave Ellie a wink as he left the room.

  ‘So?’ Sue asked with a look of hope in her eyes.

  ‘So…?’ Ellie repeated.

  ‘So has the woman who found the secret to everyone else’s true love actually found it herself?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Ellie smiled.

  ‘Well if it counts for anything, I love him!’ Maggie chipped in, returning from a cigarette in the garden. ‘He can hold his own with us lot, he’s down to earth and funny and he’s not intimidated by you, so he’s a keeper in my book.’

  ‘Do you love him?’ asked Sue. ‘If he’s your DNA Match then you must fall in love with him. That’s how it works, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she smiled, ‘I do love him.’

  ‘Well that’s reassuring to hear,’ came Tim’s voice from behind. ‘Because I’m kind of nuts about you too.’

  ‘It’s like Frozen and you’re melting Princess Elsa,’ Maggie said as Tim bent Ellie backwards and kissed her, before Maggie and her mother burst into the chorus of Let It Go.

  CHAPTER 56

  AMANDA

  ‘Not long now, my little kidney bean,’ Amanda told her baby bump as she rubbed moisturiser into her expanding breasts and belly.

  ‘Everyone’s really looking forward to meeting you and in a few weeks, you’ll be here causing me sleepless nights for the rest of my life. But I don’t care. You can throw anything at me and I’ll always be there for you.’

  She glanced into the bedroom mirror hunting for missed stretch marks and was grateful to see they hadn’t extended any further.

  For the first time since she’d left school at sixteen with a handful of GCSEs, Amanda was jobless and wasn’t searching for work either. Instead, she lived sensibly from her redundancy money and had moved in full-time with Jenny.

  Meanwhile Jenny had registered Amanda with her own doctor, enrolled her in antenatal classes at her local health centre, assisted her with her birth plan, bought her packets of vitamins, minerals and folic acids and volunteered to be her birthing partner.

  Amanda had broken off all contact with her family in the five months following her bitter confrontation with sisters Paula and Karen. A dozen or more times they and their mother had reached out and attempted to make amends with her by text, email and phone and each time they were ignored. She was still angry and disappointed that her sisters hadn’t tried to understand her point of view and recognise her need to have a child with the man she loved. But her rage was also accompanied by a sadness that they weren’t there to experience her differing stages of pregnancy like she had been with them.

  Jenny and Emma’s almost constant presence offset Amanda’s loneliness and they’d been by her side every step of the way, through her hormonal tears, her mood swings and her morning sickness. They were her family now, she realised; a hermetically sealed unit placed together by a man who no longer physically existed.

  She’d moved into Richard’s bedroom, hanging her clothes next to his on the rails in his wardrobe and placing her perfumes beside his aftershaves. She slept only on one side of the bed, leaving room for where Richard would have been. And she cuddled his favourite jumper through the night, placing it close to her face in the hope that his scent might reach the baby’s senses.

  The far end of Richard’s room was used to house a wooden cot that Amanda, Jenny and Emma had assembled one after
noon. Next to it was a rail of blue and white coloured baby clothes that Emma and Jenny had purchased, convinced that Amanda was carrying a boy.

  Amanda screwed the top back on the bottle of moisturiser and slipped her shirt back on. She realised it’d never been discussed just how long Amanda might remain living under Jenny’s roof after the baby arrived, but she already knew that she didn’t want to leave. She felt safe in that room, as if Richard’s spirit was in there with them, keeping them comfortable and protecting them from the big, bad world outside.

  She lay on her side trying to find a comfortable position and glanced again at the collage of photographs Richard had pinned to the wall. Each night she’d pore through them as well as others in albums to learn more about him. There were photos from his childhood at Disneyland or at the family’s cottage in the Lake District where a young Richard and Emma perched on bikes below a tiled house-sign reading Mount Pleasant. Amanda had seen so many pictures and with such regularity that she felt like she knew his facial expressions and mannerisms as well as she knew her own.

  Her attention was drawn to two photos of a young woman whose face seemed familiar. Amanda pondered on where she recognised her from before it dawned on her she might be same girl who’d sent Richard the nude pictures of herself which had remained on his old mobile phone. Amanda turned the phone back on but the battery had finally died, so she plugged it in and waited patiently for enough charge to make the white Apple symbol appear. Then she scrolled through the images and sure enough, the stranger was there in all her nakedness - the same girl as Richard had taped to his wall.

  She was about Richard’s age, therefore a decade younger than Amanda, and possessed perky breasts, a washboard flat stomach and pouty lips. Amanda felt an instant envy towards the unnamed girl’s youth and allure, particularly at a time when she was feeling dowdy and profoundly pregnant. But she’d rather have her swollen, lumpy and stretchmarked body and be carrying the child she’d always wanted than be a collagen-plumped stick insect.

  However, it didn’t stop Amanda from wondering how close the girl and Richard had been; clearly they were intimate enough to send each other naked selfies, but had there been anything physical between them or was it all just sex-text fun? Was she the girl he’d used half a pack of condoms with in his top drawer? Suddenly, Amanda had an overriding, irrational need to know who this girl was.

  She turned on her iPad and went back to Richard’s Facebook page to scroll through his list of friends, until she found a name to match the face – Michelle Nicholls. She clicked on her profile and discovered she lived in a village around ten miles from Jenny’s house. Michelle hadn’t set her profile to private so Amanda was able to scroll through her life in posts and pictures. And the more she read, the more grudging she became. She established Richard and Michelle had been in a relationship for about ten months, possibly only ending shortly before his death, but she couldn’t be sure. Amanda wondered if it had been around the same time he had sent his swab to Match Your DNA.

  But while Michelle had kept many photographs of them together in her profile, Richard had deleted most of her from his. It felt like a small triumph for Amanda but it also made her question why Emma or Jenny hadn’t mentioned Michelle to her, especially if she had been in Richard’s life for a considerable period of time.

  As the next few days passed, try as she might, Amanda couldn’t stop herself from returning to Michelle’s Facebook profile and skimming through her photographs and posts. She and Richard looked suited to each other with smiling selfies taken on nights out at bars, with friends in restaurants or on holiday together in Magaluf. Amanda wondered, other than the obvious, what Richard saw in her. Was she intelligent? Did she make him laugh? Could she hold herself in a conversation or was she just good in bed? Why wasn’t Michelle enough for him? Why did he feel the need to get his DNA tested to find his real Match when this gorgeous girl was clearly besotted by him?

  At first, Amanda put her curiosity down to her hormones affecting her rational thinking, but she gradually accepted there was more to it than that. Jenny and Emma had told her so much about their son and brother but there was a side to him that only somebody in a relationship would know. Amanda wanted to learn what kind of man Richard was as a partner and how it had felt to be loved by him.

  She needed to meet Michelle, so she clicked on Facebook Messenger and began to type.

  CHAPTER 57

  CHRISTOPHER

  ‘Where’ve you been? I’ve been trying to get hold of you all morning.’

  Amy sounded frustrated when Christopher finally answered her call. He glanced at his phone and saw he’d missed eleven calls from her that day. He slipped the plastic mask from his face so he wouldn’t sound muffled; his skin felt clammy and was greasy to the touch.

  ‘Sorry, I fell asleep at my desk,’ he replied. He had fallen asleep but it was actually on the sofa belonging to Number Fifteen. Dazed, he wiped the sleep from his eyes and looked around her sunlit room and then at his watch. 10.47am it read, and his heart sank.

  He’d never been careless enough to drift off at a murder scene before, but juggling the two aspects of his life – Amy and his thirty killings plan – had left him physically exhausted. He was relying on a diet of protein bars, energy drinks and coffee to keep him awake and functioning but they left him feeling restless and with frequent stomach cramps.

  Christopher’s double life was taking a mental toll too. He had so much to hide from Amy yet so much about his work that he longed to share. It left him divided and there’d even been moments when he’d contemplated disclosing what he’d been doing, trying to convince himself that because she truly loved him, she might understand. But in the end, he couldn’t trust that he had read her correctly and that she would forgive him. And she was hastily becoming too integral a part of his life to risk dispensing with.

  ‘They’ve found a thirteenth body,’ Amy whispered down the phone. ‘The papers don’t know and I’m not supposed to tell anyone but you will never guess who it is.’

  “The waitress who served us at the restaurant last week,” he wanted to say. “That pretty girl with the nose ring. I was going to kill her anyway, but I like to think I killed her for us as something to share. Now you have blood on your hands too.”

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said and rose to his feet to stretch his spine and stiff neck.

  ‘It was the waitress from the restaurant we went to last week, do you remember?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Pretty girl with dark hair and a nose ring.’

  ‘Ahh yes, I do now. Shit, what happened to her?’

  ‘Same as all the others, she was strangled and laid out in her kitchen. He tore the ring out too, the sick bastard.’

  Christopher made his way into the kitchen and glared at Number Fifteen who was lying in the same position he’d left her on the floor. After seven hours of death her face had sunken, her skin was grey and for a reason he couldn’t explain she had already begun to attract flies. He checked his pocket to make sure he had taken two photographs of her and to his relief, he had. A picture of how she looked at that moment would ruin the aesthetic of his album.

  ‘Poor girl,’ Christopher replied to Amy and flicked through his backpack to make sure he had packed everything he’d brought with him. He removed a lint roller and began to manoeuvre it across every inch of the sofa where he’d slept.

  ‘I recognised her as soon as I saw the photograph which at least sped up the identification process.’

  ‘And are you okay?’

  ‘I think so, it just brought the investigation a little closer to home.’

  “You have no idea just how close to home you are already,” thought Christopher.

  CHAPTER 58

  BETHANY

  ‘Not bad eh?’ Dan asked, standing back and admiring their work. ‘Not how I imagined my kid’s wedding reception to be, but then nothing’s how I imagined it to be any more.’

  He looked to Bet
hany like he was hoping she could say something that would make everything okay. Instead, the best that she could offer was an arm around his shoulder in a silent show of solidarity.

  She had spent much of the previous day assisting Susan and Dan and their farmhands in erecting a white tarpaulin above a grassy stretch of the garden to prevent the weight of the sun from pressing down upon them. They’d unfolded wooden tables and chairs, placed pink and white posies in jam-jars and arranged them in clumps on linen table covers, and plugged speakers into a sound system to play music. And the next morning - a little over a month since she had arrived so unexpectedly at their farm - Bethany was preparing to become Mrs. Kevin Williamson.

  The venue Kevin had chosen for the ceremony was the old breezeblock church in the village nearest to the farm. It was unlike any other house of worship Bethany had ever visited, and without the wooden crucifix planted in the ground by the road or a signpost reading Baptist Church, most passers by would assume it to be a dilapidated storage building. Inside was an altar made from an old porch door on bricks, the seating consisted of white-faded patio chairs and the one and only window had been decorated with coloured tissue paper so as to resemble stained glass. But as derelict as it appeared, there was a certain quirky, sanguine charm to it, Bethany thought. Nothing about her life in the last few weeks had been ordinary, so why should the venue of her wedding be any different?

  The ceremony was held in front of an intimate congregation, consisting of just Kevin’s immediate family, his last remaining grandparent, two cousins and some of their farmhand staff. And it was as brief as the time it took Bethany to choose a dress from the slim pickings her suitcase held.

  As the elderly and affable reverend began reading passages from the well-thumbed pages of a bible, Bethany was sure to maintain eye contact with her husband-to-be at all times, even when she felt his brother Mark’s eyes burrowing into her. As Kevin’s best man, he was there to prop him up at the altar when his arms grew too weak leaning on his crutches. However Kevin was a stubborn soul and refused to remain seated. He couldn’t stop grinning at Bethany but she knew that if she so much as glanced at Mark, she’d have put an end to the whole charade.